Mr. Magazine

“If you don’t know why your brand needs to exist and how it exists in all those other arenas, whether it’s on social media feeds or digitally or on mobile; if you don’t know your voice and how you’re different than everybody else, you’re really screwed.” Ariel Foxman

Fashion and style, with a sense of mystique and fantasy; InStyle Magazine remains a compelling leader in the category today. Editor, Ariel Foxman believes the brand says it all and that giving your customers what they want, when they want it and via the relevant platform secures their top spot among the elite. As a magazine connoisseur, Foxman follows his competition set closely, especially new launches.

“If it’s in print and it’s in our world, I definitely want to look at it,” Foxman said.

From experimenting with covers and colors – the daring move of using the no-no of green and making it work, to testing shiny versus matte; InStyle spins the chamber of the magazine, hoping for a bullet that hits and resonates with its audience. And proving that taking chances pays off when you know your audience and your brand intimately.

Ariel took time between his trips to Milan and Paris to talk with me about the magazine, the future, and the reasons behind InStyle’s success. What follows is a conversation between one self-proclaimed magazine junkie to another:

But first – the sound-bites.

Ariel Foxman’s Sound-bites:

On the importance of a magazine’s point of view…
I think the inherent challenge of any editor or anybody who is creating content for an audience that’s hungry for news or hungry for service is to make sure your point of view is really differentiated.

On the fashion and style world…
Fashion and the world of style have to have an element of mystique and fantasy in it to remain compelling. In order to draw people in, the world of fashion has to be mysterious, it has to have allure, a sex appeal and it has to have an element of what’s around the corner.

On keeping tabs on the other fashion/style magazines in Instyle’s competitive set…
You know, it would be disingenuous for me to say that I don’t look at everything that’s in the category at large because not only am I an editor but I’m also a magazine junkie like yourself. If something is in print and it’s in our world, then I definitely want to look at it.

On the assumption that green on a cover is a no-no on newsstands…
Magazines start to blend into each other after a while. And green really was striking because no one does green.

On the importance of a magazine brand being unique…
If you don’t know why your brand is unique in your field, what it has to say about your category and how it says it, you’re having a very hard time right now.

On native advertising being a new term for an old practice…
I’m happy that there are conversations now about native advertising and that everybody in the room and then some now has a word for this sort of thing because it’s not a new idea. Sponsored content is not a new idea, it’s a very old idea and it’s existed in every media including print.

On whether a new venture should start in print versus other platforms…
Once you know that audience exists you can answer the question then; where is that audience primarily looking for the content? If it’s digital start there, if it’s print start there.

On what keeps Ariel Foxman up at night…
What keeps me up at night? From the magazine it really has to do with our readers. I really want to make sure that our magazine stays fun and fresh.

And now Mr. Magazine’s™ lightly edited conversation with the Editor of InStyle Magazine, Ariel Foxman.

Samir Husni: This is the largest March issue of InStyle and in September you had the largest September issue — this has been going on and on. Do you think we have a problem in print, in general with ink on paper or do we have a problem in content?

Ariel Foxman: When you say that we’re experiencing our newest issues and it’s going on and on and on, I don’t see a problem with that. I think that my challenge as an editor is always to make sure that we are remaining relevant and useful and entertaining in an environment that is getting more and more fragmented and louder and louder.

I think the inherent challenge of any editor or anybody who is creating content for an audience that’s hungry for news or hungry for service is to make sure your point of view is really differentiated so that with everything that’s being served to you whether it’s for a fee or free is very clearly differentiated and I know InStyle is enjoying the success that it’s enjoying because InStyle’s point of view is incredibly clear.

It’s equal parts inspiring and informative, so if you like style and you want that to be a part of your everyday experience, you know that InStyle, whether it’s digital or print, is going to give you that experience, where you’re taken to a fantasy place but at the same time you’re able to experience that piece of the world of style in reality.

SH: So in this world of inspiration and aspiration and mixing service and fantasy; do you think this is the secret recipe for the success of InStyle?

AF: You know I don’t think there is one secret to our success, but I think it’s a very big piece of why we resonate with millions and millions of women.

Fashion and the world of style have to have an element of mystique and fantasy in it to remain compelling. In order to draw people in, the world of fashion has to be mysterious, it has to have allure, sex appeal and it has to have an element of what’s around the corner. And that’s not true of every industry, so inherently there’s this tension in fashion and style that to draw people in and make it compelling — there’s mystery.

But along with mystery comes confusion, there comes the potential for alienation so InStyle is able to take that magnetism that is inherent in the mystique of style and turn that inside out and take you to the next level. So is it a secret ingredient? I don’t know, but it’s what we do best. We inspire you but we don’t just then drop you off a cliff.

It’s very easy to inspire people with gorgeous images — it’s very easy to show people a gorgeous dress on a beautiful woman — people have been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years. What’s not easy is to inspire somebody and then explain to them — knowing what their life is all about — that they can do something like that that makes sense for their everyday. That is what we do and I think that’s one of the secrets to our success.

SH: So, that’s one major issue that differentiates InStyle from the rest of the crowd in this category. However, in this category it looks like there are more newcomers coming. I’m sure you saw the media reports, that Porter is now a threat to Vogue, and all these media pundits are suddenly issuing their usual predictions of doom and gloom. It went against the trend that print is dead almost with no exception; yet all these magazines are growing in print and expanding their brand. What do you think about newcomers like Porter or Editorialist — are they enhancing the category, are they making your job harder or are you just going on doing your own thing with blinders on?

AF: You know, it would be disingenuous for me to say that I don’t look at everything that’s in the category at large because not only am I an editor but I’m also a magazine junkie like yourself. If something is in print and in it’s in our world, then I definitely want to look at it. To say I don’t look at anything would be just an out and out lie.

So I’m looking at everything not only as an editor but also as a consumer — a consumer of style news and a consumer of style period. I think you blur the lines when you broaden the category of our set to include everything that looks like a magazine to be a magazine.

But to answer your question about blinders, InStyle is a very unique proposition and I’m very focused on making sure that InStyle remains differentiated and deliver to our readers and our users what they love about InStyle the best. Do I look at the competition? Of course. Do I try to do an InStyle version of the competition? Absolutely not. Nobody wants that, nobody needs that and quite frankly we’re in the No. 1 position so it’s my job to make sure that we only grow our market share, it’s not my job to make sure we do a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

And I also think the sort of competition that a lot of the articles are about in our competition set is really media writing about the set in a way that isn’t even necessarily what’s happening. I think the set is a lot more supportive than is really even reported.

SH: Lately, I’ve noticed that you’ve been doing a lot of testing with the covers. I see one place where InStyle is in red, and I see once place where it’s in silver. What’s the idea? What are you trying to achieve by manipulating the colors on the cover?

AF: We’ve been doing a lot of market testing for years now. We’re celebrating our 20th anniversary and over that time, Time Inc. has afforded InStyle the opportunity to pre-test covers and that’s always happened and we’ve had a history of that which is wonderful.

It doesn’t select the cover ultimately, but it definitely helps us fine-tune cover lines and maybe one iteration of an image over another. In terms of live market testing, it’s really interesting for us to be able to test our own conventional wisdom about certain things.

For instance, when you’re talking silver over red, that is a very specific situation where we had an idea in our head that foil on a cover may or may not attract more readers to newsstands. Conventional wisdom would argue that if it’s shiny more people will notice and more people will buy it, right? But you really don’t know that until you put it out in the market with a non-shiny alternative. So that’s why you see it in some markets with shiny covers and some markets not. And you have to do it a few times before you can really say that that was statistically significant. That’s what you’re seeing.

Another interesting live market test that we just did has to do with the conventional wisdom amongst editors that green covers do not sell. Don’t put somebody in a green dress, don’t put green type on. Like people have an aversion to green on the newsstands.

Well, we shot Taylor Swift in November 2013 in this gorgeous green Burberry sweater and skirt and we shot her in a bunch of other things, the film came back, and I was like “that’s the outfit, that’s the image.” And rather than fighting it and trying to balance the green, we designed a cover, our creative director created this gorgeous very holistic green, all green cover and we thought to ourselves “Wow we’re really crazy.” Not only are we having green on the cover, we’re going full-throttle.

And we loved the cover and we all responded to it, and I said, “Look, how can so many of us be wrong? Somebody else is going to respond to this on the newsstand.” And I thought this is a great opportunity to test this conventional wisdom. Let’s put the majority on the newsstand all green and then let’s put a small sample of it out on the newsstand live market with the green outfit and do a crimson InStyle logo and the reality is the issue was up eight percent year over year and the green cover overall was up eight percent year over year.

So it performed really well, people did love green. And when you look at the green versus the crimson cover, the green outperformed the crimson. So it’s less about throwing things out there to see what will stick or uncertainty and more about using the live market to test hunches that we’ve grown accustomed to having and saying, “Why do you think that and is it even true?”

SH: It stopped me on my tracks when I saw the green cover with the green logo.

AF: Magazines start to blend into each other after a while. And green really was striking because no one does green. But when I came on board six years ago, one of the covers that I had worked on was an April issue with Renee Zellweger in a bright, bright green ball gown and I remember everyone saying we might as well not even deliver these copies to the newsstands, not because Renee Zellweger is not appealing, but because it’s this big green dress. It sold so many copies.

So if green is done great or at the right moment in time depending on what’s on the newsstands in comparison, green can do really well.

SH: It’s time for me to change my lecture on design when I tell the students never ever use green on your cover.

AF: Well, we’re the outlier.

SH: How did your job change over those six years. We’ve seen a massive change in the magazine industry, in the magazine media industry — how did the job of the editor change to become the chief content officer with everything else that surrounds that job?

AF: Things changed immensely. If you don’t know why your brand is unique in your field, what it has to say about your category and how it says it, you’re having a very hard time right now.

It was one thing to be able to put out a magazine, if you had skills just to be able to put out a print publication — which is no small task — your skills were really just about creating and picking beautiful images and flow of magazine, all still things I have to do, but if you weren’t really sure of this is what we say and how we say it and why we say it and why do we all that differently, now with the explosion of all the different platforms, if you didn’t know all those things, you don’t know why your brand needs to exist and how it exists in all those other arenas, whether it’s on social media feeds or digitally or on mobile; if you don’t know your voice and how you’re different than everybody else, you’re really screwed.

A good chunk of my job, and it wasn’t the case three or four years ago, is making sure our brand maintains those values and shows up in those places and delivers the content in that voice to the women who want that brand experience either in addition to print or outside of print. And that is the challenge. So you love what InStyle delivers, how we are delivering it to you wherever and whenever you want.
The second change is the brand is a business, it’s not a magazine. The magazine is a very big piece of our business — like 616 pages, our largest ever — but the growth is not only coming from year over year growth in print, it’s coming from additional revenue streams. Now the magazine always had extensions, we’ve always had special issues, we’ve always had foreign publications, we had TV shows, all that. But now the expectations of the editor are what else are you putting out there for a consumer?

So just last year we launched a shoe line, a collaboration with Nine West. We launched a shirt collection. This year we’re looking to grow both of those. We’re looking at a way to evolve our subscription offerings. We’re re-launching our website with a completely fresh design that will allow us to produce additional content with more native opportunities.

So it’s really about putting on that hat where you’re thinking OK, yes the business has to have multiple spokes which honestly, that should have been the job of the editor many years ago. If you weren’t planting the seeds ultimately you would have hit a wall in terms of growth. There’s only so many ads that any brand can carry without diversification. If a brand doesn’t show diversification in other places, it really doesn’t show vibrancy. Without vibrancy you’re not going to attract more ads, it’s very cyclical.

SH: You mentioned briefly native advertising. As a journalist, as a chief content officer, do you think there’s more pressure on editors now from the business side to incorporate native advertising, to do something with advertising or are you still safeguarding the print and putting native advertising on the web? What’s your philosophy?

AF: I don’t think there’s more pressure, I feel like the pressure is the same. There’s always pressure to make money, which I think is a very healthy pressure.

The delineation is very clear; who is selling and who is creating. I think that everybody including the sales team has a very strong respect for the consumer without whom there is no business. If there isn’t a consumer who respects the product and comes back repeatedly for the product you have no business, you have no client that is attracted to any product. Everybody has a very clear and articulated respect for that.

So I think we’re very, very good about that. I think any pressure you have to make money; the foundation is based on a respect for the consumer. I’m happy that there are conversations now about native advertising and that everybody in the room and then some now has a word for this sort of thing because it’s not a new idea.

Sponsored content is not a new idea, it’s a very old idea and it’s existed in every media including print. Advertorial, content solutions, every big publishing company has had a content solutions department for years, you’ve seen native advertising for decades. You ask, and I know you ask this knowing the answer, is it just digital only?

We’ve had advertorial in print for many, many, many years and I’m happy to run advertorial. Why? Because they’re well executed, they fit firmly in the book, they bring revenue, and most importantly they’re clearly marked. Promotion, sponsored advertising, whatever it is. And native advertising, digitally, will also be clearly marked. And you know what? Sometimes they have really good content. Sometimes now that they’re brought into the light, there will be an opportunity for more attention, not to the sacrifice of editorial attention, but more attention can be brought to them to up the quality of these enterprises. I think that serves the consumer and the client as well. I think talking about it only helps. And you know backroom conversations about do we think the consumer will know the difference is not helpful, the more people talking about it the better.

SH: What advice would you give someone who came to you today and said, “I have this great idea! Can I start in print or do I have to be on all the platforms from the very beginning?” I see all these digital companies are coming to print. What would you tell the person?

AF: I would never tell anyone who had a good idea that they were crazy. First I would ask them what is the reason that your voice needs to exist? If the person could clearly define what is the differentiated voice in that category then it’s not only a good idea, it’s an idea that needs to exist.

So if that idea needs to exist that means there’s a disenfranchised audience somewhere. There’s an audience that’s hungry for that voice in that category sphere. Once you know that that audience exists you can answer the question then; where is that audience primarily looking for the content?

If it’s digital start there, if it’s print start there. If they’re looking for a certain type of execution in different spheres, figure out where is going to be the easiest to launch. I think you have to decide also where the client base is. But meet your audience where he or she is going to be. It’s much easier than creating something and moving people to a place.

Find a need, create a voice, and meet them where they are. But people are launching things all the time and the only reason why they do is they see a need, a disenfranchised audience and they know a way to reach them. I’m always happily surprised when you see a digital enterprise decide you know what it would be nice to create a quarterly magazine based on the aesthetic, the voice, the audience that we’ve created primarily.

SH: Here’s the question, you are at home, sitting on your favorite chair or lounge with a glass of wine in your hand reading a magazine. Forget about InStyle; what other magazine would that be?

AF: What would that magazine be? That’s a good question. It’s either New York Magazine or Departures.

SH: My last question to you… What keeps Ariel up at night?

AF: What keeps me up at night? From the magazine it really has to do with our readers. I really want to make sure that our magazine stays fun and fresh. The biggest concern I have about the magazine is when do we retire something that I know is very popular in the magazine or online and introduce something new that I think they would really get a kick out of. That’s the type of thing I’m always kind of struggling with.

SH: Thank you.
© Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni, 2014.

“And you know magazines are not going away. The one thing that I think is so special about print is it’s the one medium where consumers say that the advertising is part of the overall experience.”
…Eric Schwarzkopf

A call to action is the description Fitness Magazine’s publisher, Eric Schwarzkopf, gives the magazine’s new tagline: “Move Forward.” A unique twist to magazine renovations; promoting a tagline change is something not usually done. But Fitness Magazine (a Meredith publication) has always been a motivator and an inspiration to women since its inception in 1992. And retiring the ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ tagline shows a print product determined to “move forward” and continue that energetic impetus.

A man who believes in print, but concurs that every platform must be a viable option for the customer, Schwarzkopf knows the value of the brand. Changing the tagline to a more forceful, dominant command brings this stellar debut its own special connotation: to “Move Forward” to a more healthier and vibrant you. Something he thinks each of the magazine’s readers can and will appreciate.

So sit back and enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with the publisher of Fitness Magazine, Eric Schwarzkopf.

But first the sound-bites:

On digital brands venturing into print…
I think it’s important to be everywhere that the consumer is and if digital brands are realizing that print is a smart and viable place that people are not abandoning then it’s wise for them to be everywhere with their message.

On Fitness Magazine changing its tagline…
“Mind, Body, Spirit” had been our tagline for 20 years and it really embraced our philosophy and the way women were looking at the world and what they wanted from their lives, and that probably still applies to this day. We just felt that after two decades it was probably time to modernize that and just give it a fresh new voice.

On an explanation of the new tagline “Move Forward”…
We feel like it’s another way to differentiate our brand from what can be a crowded category. I hope it resonates with readers, I think it will because it sort of invokes that Newton’s Law of Motion — objects and things in motion stay in motion.

On why the tagline isn’t on the cover…
It’s on the spine and inside the magazine. So we put it in those two places and whether it finds its way to the front cover, we’ll see.

On the future of Fitness magazine…
Still the publisher of a brand that is primarily driven by print but one that has other assets that are catching up and certainly online advertising will continue to grow so that will be a bigger percentage of our overall revenue. And we do very well with events and experiential marketing. But I believe print three years from now will still be by far our largest piece of the pie but the others will certainly grow.

On the biggest stumbling block for magazines and magazine media today…
I would have to say it is less dollars available in print, so in past years advertisers might buy three or four titles within our category. Nowadays, they’re only buying one, or magazines within a category. They’re not going as deep with their buys so that creates quite a competitive battle.

On how Fitness Magazine can get past that stumbling block…
Well, we need to continue to prove to advertisers that our readers are more engaged and more responsive to these ad messages than those in our competitors.

On something new Fitness Magazine is doing…
We have about two million e-newsletters that we send out on a monthly basis and one of the more successful ones is called the Daily Fit Tip and there are over 525,000 women who have opted in to receive that Daily Fit Tip email every day.

And now the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ conversation with the publisher of Fitness magazine, Eric Schwarzkopf.

—–

Samir Husni: First what I’d like to know from you, if you’re the doctor that was going to keep your hand on the pulse of Fitness, how would you describe it? What’s the pulse of Fitness magazine today and fitness in general?

Eric Schwarzkopf: The pulse of the magazine today is thriving and ever evolving. As the media landscape changes and consumers’ media consumptions change, we have to stay in lock and step with that and try to move as fast as we can. As ad dollars sort of flow in different directions and have this slight trickle away from print, we need to make sure we can be there with our editorial voice and our advertiser’s messages at every touch point in a woman’s life.

SH: You mentioned the ad dollars trickling away from print; why do you think then we are seeing a lot of digital entities — like Pitchfork or Porter or a lot of these digital websites — migrating into print and launching print magazines in addition to their digital?

ES: And allrecipes.com right?

SH: Is it time for us to rethink the business model of print or the entire business model for the magazine media?

ES: I think it’s important to be everywhere that the consumer is and if digital brands are realizing that print is a smart and viable place that people are not abandoning then it’s wise for them to be everywhere with their message. What we’re trying to do, they’re just doing it in reverse.

SH: Tell me a little bit about this move with Fitness from “Mind, Body, Spirit” to “Move Forward,” this new tagline. What was the thinking behind it, besides the commitment to move the advertising partners’ business forward by connecting their brands — what you mentioned in the press release — but more in reality, how do you identify…

ES: “Mind, Body, Spirit” had been our tagline for 20 years and it really embraced our philosophy and the way women were looking at the world and what they wanted from their lives, and that probably still applies to this day. We just felt that after two decades it was probably time to modernize that and just give it a fresh new voice.

So we worked with an outside company and we had top editors and our top folks on the marketing and advertising side and we reviewed many different taglines and this was the one we honed in on. It was one of those that we said, “That’s it, there it is.” That’s what you want out of these brainstorming sessions — the one idea that everybody says, “There it is, that captures the essence of it.”

It really does have this double entendre to it about the physical and the fitness piece of moving forward and building a healthy mind and a healthy body. But also the figurative side to it, moving forward in your life. Whether that’s from a healthy attitudinal spirit, it can apply to your professional life. It just sort of moves people toward goals that drive this sense of confidence. We felt like that was a good one.

SH: In all honesty, I can’t remember a day in recent memory where a magazine focused so much on the tagline. It’s a first that a magazine is sending press releases and doing all sorts of publicity based on a tagline. How important is the tagline to the industry, to the advertisers or are you combining the tagline with something else? Is there something bigger than just changing a tagline?

ES: We feel like it’s another way to differentiate our brand from what can be a crowded category. I hope it resonates with readers, I think it will because it sort of invokes that Newton’s Law of Motion — objects and things in motion stay in motion.

In such a busy world, it’s nice to think of it in multiple ways: One in your physicality but two in your sort of spirituality, if you will. I think we’re just trying to create one more point of differentiation for us. It can be for people at any level, at any age. You don’t have to be an expert exerciser or triathlete. You can be an absolute beginner. It’s celebrating women’s power to sort of take control of their lives and be confident.

SH: You mentioned that there’s a lot of competition now. Kristine Welker, the publisher of Dr. Oz The Good Life, talks a lot about wellness. Is fitness wellness?

ES: Absolutely. Oh gosh, yes. In fact, I think the tagline helps us because I think there is a propensity for people to see our name and think of it in a very vertical manner. And it is definitely not the way our website or our magazine or our social media is really conveyed. Certainly exercise is a part of our story but we deliver the most health and wellness edit of any magazine in our category, in fact, even more than Health Magazine.

So yes, wellness is enormous and it touches so many facets of our lives — the food we eat, the way we stay active, our mental health. The wellness piece is very important.

SH: I don’t know if that’s a split test, but the copy that I found on the newsstands of fitness did not have the tagline on the cover. Is that something that was done on purpose?

ES: It’s on the spine and inside the magazine. So we put it in those two places and whether it finds its way to the front cover, we’ll see. That’s certainly up to Betty Wong, our editor in chief. At this juncture we all feel comfortable with it starting out on the spine and the masthead.

SH: Can you tell me a little bit about the market in general? I mean you’ve been dealing with print and you are now “moving forward” to digital and other platforms. With events, with everything else that Fitness magazine is sponsoring; what does the future look like for you two or three years from now? Will you still be a publisher of a brand strictly based in print or will you be publisher of a brand that’s digital that has a print entity. Where do you see yourself three years from now?

ES: Still the publisher of a brand that is primarily driven by print but one that has other assets that are catching up and certainly online advertising will continue to grow so that will be a bigger percentage of our overall revenue. And we do very well with events and experiential marketing.

We have a lot of web series that we are out there producing for people and we have custom videos that we’re doing more and more of, so I think we’ll continue to see our growth in those areas. Social media continues to be very big as well and that’s a revenue builder as well. So I think the ad revenue pie will grow in the other areas. But I believe print three years from now will still be by far our largest piece of the pie but the others will certainly grow.

SH: Are you facing any, not necessarily challenges, but any demands from advertisers to use native advertising on the pages of the magazine?

ES: Yes, that’s been happening for a number of years. We feel that print was the originator for native advertising. We started that. We’ve been talking about brands in our articles since the beginning of time so I believe we’ve been doing that, not generating ad revenue — there’s the church and state line. But yes, that pressure and those requests continue from clients and agencies. So we’re trying to navigate our way through that and maintain the respect for editors as well as not creating confusion for the consumer.

SH: What’s the most difficult hurdle that you see facing magazines and magazine media in the near future? What’s your biggest stumbling block today?

ES: I would have to say it is less dollars available in print, so in past years advertisers might buy three or four titles within our category. Nowadays, they’re only buying one, or magazines within a category. They’re not going as deep with their buys so that creates quite a competitive battle.

SH: Then you can predict my next question…How are you going to jump over that hurdle?

ES: Well, we need to continue to prove to advertisers that our readers are more engaged and more responsive to these ad messages than those in our competitors. And we have some very solid research that does prove that, whether it’s Starch from MRI and we consistently score exceptionally high on that, quite often No. 1 versus our competitive set for buying a product, telling a friend about a product, tearing out an ad, visiting a website. That is compelling stuff.

And then of course as far as Meredith is concerned, we’re the only company that has partnered with Nielsen Homescan to prove ROI with a money back guarantee. The Meredith sales guarantee has been a wonderful tool to have in our arsenal.

SH: Are you using that in Fitness also now?

ES: Oh, yes. I think 27 brands have taken advantage of the Meredith sales guarantee and the Nielsen Homescan data and every single brand has seen a lift in sales and Fitness has been involved with I would say at least one third of those if not half of them. So it’s been a solid tool for us.

SH: Who do you consider to be your No. 1 or No. 2 competitor? You keep on referring to the competitive set. Who is your competitive set?

ES: Our competitive set is Shape, Women’s Health and Self. We include Health in that group from time to time. Their median age is about 10 years older than ours so they are sometimes not in our competitive just because they’re older. The core books are Shape, Women’s Health and Self.

SH: With the demands on print and with advertisers now selecting one or two instead of going deeper into each category; do you fear that a day will come when each one of these categories will only have one or two? Is it the survival of the fittest? Or what’s your recipe for success, for staying a leader in this category because all the names you mentioned are tough competition?

ES: We think delivering our reader, our woman exactly what she wants, that that is the key to success and not trying to be all things to all people. We know that our readers love our brand because they love our exercise-related editorial, our nutrition editorial, our health editorial. We aren’t trying to cover sex and relationships and finance and a lot of other things and there are magazines out there that are trying to become almost general interest.

We know why our readers like our magazine and our website and we try to stay true to that. We feel that is the real key to success, giving her what she wants and what she needs. And our audience numbers, we just had a 24 percent increase in our audience the fall wave of MRI and every other magazine in our category had a decrease. So we had a substantial growth there.

Our web traffic is enormous and we are generally No. 1 or No. 2 in web traffic for monthly unique visitors. We’re at 4.7 million uniques right now from comScore. There are really solid numbers being delivered. We have 1.2 million followers on Facebook, which is huge within our category. We give her what she wants so she comes back.

SH: If somebody comes to you and says, “Eric, you’re a publisher, you’ve been doing this for some time, I have an idea for a new magazine,” what would you tell them?

ES: I would tell them make sure you have good financial backing. That you have all the other mediums covered off. That you must have a good website, you must have a strong social media platform and you must really understand who your target audience is and what they want and deliver that in a best-in-class manner.

SH: My final question, my traditional final question, what keeps Eric up at night?

ES: Thinking about the next cool, compelling idea that’s going to make our advertisers jump for joy, ring their registers and make our female audience very happy with the content they’re receiving or the experience they’re receiving from our brand. We’re always thinking about the next cool thing.

We are just unveiling something new as well; I don’t think the press release has anything on this, so you’re getting a little scoop.

We have about two million e-newsletters that we send out on a monthly basis and one of the more successful ones is called the Daily Fit Tip and there are over 525,000 women who have opted in to receive that Daily Fit Tip email every day.

And we just partnered with The Better Show, Meredith’s daily talk show, and we’re now bringing the Daily Fit Tip to life so it’s a really fun 60-second segment that takes place every day on the daily show and now we can integrate advertisers not only into the newsletter and into the magazine but also into the TV show as well. That’s a new program we have out there.

Last year, we also reached out to the folks at Men’s Journal. That was a rarity in the media industry. I reached out to the folks at Wenner Media because we don’t have any purely male titles at Meredith and felt like it would be a good thing for both of our brands to have a male/female counterpart. So that has proven to be a successful partnership for us as well with the Men’s Journal folks.

It’s those types of things that keep me up at night, trying to think of the next new program, the best new ways to deliver advertisers messages.

And you know, magazines are not going away. The one thing that I think is so special about print is it’s the one medium where consumers say that the advertising is part of the overall experience.

SH: Thank you.
© Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni, 2014.